Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Libraries are gearing up for the first overhaul in cataloging rules in nearly three decades, coupled with the challenge of implementing them in a dramatically changed world of information. One major newcomer since the 1990s is FRBR so we invited Dr. Athena Salaba from Kent State SLIS to begin the meeting with a presentation on FRBR and its impact on libraries and their catalogs, as well as how it relates to RDA. Rick Block, Head of Special Collections Metadata and Cataloging at Columbia, and an adjunct professor at the Library Schools of the Pratt Institute and Long Island University, will follow with a brief overview of RDA and then provide us with ideas for how we can already start preparing for its implementation. As you can see, the objective of the day is not the nuts and bolts of these two new standards, but rather, getting ready to take on this new way of describing and retrieving information from our catalogs. Please join us as we prepare for this brave new world!

Monday, April 12, 2010

At present NACO requires a library belong to OCLC to participate. The high cost to join OCLC prevents many specialized small libraries from being NACO members. Yet, in places like the Lunar and Planetary Institute we have close contact with the authors in the planetary science community. I'm sure, there are other institutions too small to join OCLC but close to a community of scholars. We, and others like us, could be valuable members of NACO.

5. Is it required that my library use a bibliographic utility to participate in NACO?

At this time NACO participants belong to OCLC in order to contribute authorities online. A PCC Working Group is investigating other options.

I'd be glad to hear that SkyRiver Technology was one of the options being discussed. I hope the folks at SkyRiver are working on this.

The Library of Congress and the MODS Editorial Committee are happy to announce the release of a draft MODS 3.4 Schema for community review. The draft Schema itself may be found at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/futures/mods-3-4.xsd, and a list of changes it implements from 3.3 is available at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/changes-3-4.html. Draft text to be added to the User Guidelines for these new features and a link from the MODS home page to the draft Schema will be available soon; watch this list for details.

The community review of the MODS 3.4 draft Schema will last one month, until May 12, 2010. We hope that various MODS implementers will test this Schema in various ways, both trying out the new features and verifying that existing 3.x MODS records still validate to the new 3.4 Schema as we intend. Testing results, comments, questions, and any other discussion on the 3.4 Schema should be sent to this email list: mods@listserv.loc.gov.

We are happy to announce the release of DBpedia 3.5. The new release is based on Wikipedia dumps dating from March 2010. Compared to the 3.4 release, we were able to increase the quality of the DBpedia knowledge base by employing a new data extraction framework which applies various data cleansing heuristics as well as by extending the infobox-to-ontology mappings that guide the data extraction process.

The new DBpedia knowledge base describes more than 3.4 million things, out of which 1.47 million are classified in a consistent ontology, including 312,000 persons, 413,000 places, 94,000 music albums, 49,000 films, 15,000 video games, 140,000 organizations, 146,000 species and 4,600 diseases. The DBpedia data set features labels and abstracts for these 3.2 million things in up to 92 different languages; 1,460,000 links to images and 5,543,000 links to external web pages; 4,887,000 external links into other RDF datasets, 565,000 Wikipedia categories, and 75,000 YAGO categories. The DBpedia knowledge base altogether consists of over 1 billion pieces of information (RDF triples) out of which 257 million were extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia and 766 million were extracted from other language editions.